


little beast

by sinagtala (strikinglight)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Haircuts, M/M, Slow Burn, rarepairsonice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 17:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9334412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/sinagtala
Summary: Otabek looks at him, hands buried in his jacket pockets. He sees the ends of Yuri’s hair feathering downward past his shoulders, the sharp slant of his clavicle under his shirt collar, and a quarter to midnight looks, suddenly, so much more like dawn.“You’re growing it out,” he says, when he’d only meant to say hello, because Yuri Plisetsky has taught him how to forget himself too.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Day 1 offering for [YOI Rarepair Week on Tumblr.](https://rarepairsonice.tumblr.com/rules) Title lifted from the eponymous Richard Siken poem.
> 
> Written mostly because I couldn't decide what I most want to happen to Yuri's hair as he ages. A lot of fanart has him growing it out, which I love, but I like the idea of him cutting it short, too, if only to make a point.

Before all else, Otabek knows him as the boy who’s always saying “no.” In the dining hall, no, he doesn’t need to eat any more. In the dorms, no, he doesn’t miss home. At the barre, on the ice, no, nothing hurts. No, no, no, he can keep going.

Otabek is twelve this past fall. This boy can be no older than ten; he is small and fair and makes all the adults chase after him, fawning even as they fuss and scold. Little Yuri Plisetsky, whom no one seems able to speak about without superlatives—so golden and gifted, so _beautiful._

From where he sits on the floor, waiting out a pulled muscle in one calf and the sharp stinging burn of shame in the pit of his chest, Otabek watches him dance. What he sees is not gold, but iron in a fire, being tempered into steel. Steel in the soles of his feet and his arms and his eyes. Nowhere more than in those eyes.

Somehow that, too, is beautiful, though the word itself hardly seems like enough.

 

* * *

 

Otabek never learns to dance, but with each year that passes, he gets better at moving.

It had cut at him, at twelve, to leave Almaty for St. Petersburg. The whole city had cut at him, returning home to him in little shards, bright and hard-edged—orange and yellow tulips afire in the window of a flower shop, the jagged silhouette of a mountain range, the sun and eagle of the Kazakh flag embroidered in gold thread above his heart.

It takes him a year to learn that moving forward is easier than staying still when no return is possible. A year and a flight across the sea to Chicago, stretching the distance between himself and longing. Another two years to Toronto, and he stops looking back.

Before him—every year, every day—is Yuri Plisetsky, the same image somehow always repeating itself back to him, white-lit and wavering on computer screens and televisions. Rigid back, dagger-points of his shoulders hiked aggressively high, bright hair a signal fire.

The eyes Otabek doesn’t need to see. The eyes he remembers, and carries close to himself as he flies.

 

* * *

 

“Yuri, get on.”

They’re fifteen and eighteen in the alley in Barcelona, and Yuri Plisetsky’s knuckles are white around the curves of a spare motorcycle helmet. He has the hood of his jacket dragged all the way down over his forehead and a body like a coiled wire, fighting and tensing and pulling itself ever more inward with every distant _Yurochka, Yurochka._

Otabek already knows he’s forgotten. He’s been ready, all this time, to do the work of remembering for both of them.

“Are you coming or not?”

He half-expects a no, as the boy in his memories said no without hesitation to all such questions ( _Does it hurt? Are you hungry? Do you need help?)_ , but in the intervening years Yuri seems to have learned there are many ways to do battle. He lowers his hood, sets the helmet on his head and buckles himself into it. He squares his shoulders and comes.

 

* * *

 

The year after is Vienna, maybe. Or Brussels, or Dornach. The truth is it doesn’t matter beyond being a new place to be strange in—the place where they meet, and unravel the months in between.

Otabek knows his own mind. He knows his own keen memory, his focused attention, but somehow he always underestimates how much Yuri Plisetsky has to teach him about forgetfulness. They step into each other’s shadows and forget the name of the city, the words on the street signs, the curfew they’re both deep in the middle of breaking. It’s anything but an accident, this time.

Otabek looks at him, hands buried in his jacket pockets. He sees the ends of Yuri’s hair feathering downward past his shoulders, the sharp slant of his clavicle under his shirt collar, and a quarter to midnight looks, suddenly, so much more like dawn.

“You’re growing it out,” he says, when he’d only meant to say hello, because Yuri Plisetsky has taught him how to forget himself too.

“Beka.” Yuri’s voice is strident, fracturing—Otabek hears the warning bells go off inside his head, but his hand’s already reaching out, and Yuri’s hair is so many skeins of silk to touch. “I want—”

When his fingers glide through that hair and press in, digging into Yuri’s scalp, he thinks he ought to apologize. Except upon reflection Yuri’s somehow doing the same to him, but with considerably more nail, and anyway their mouths are somewhat occupied.

 

* * *

 

And then, too quickly, they are seventeen and twenty and Otabek is on his back on the floor of a hotel room in Marseilles, and Yuri Plisetsky is—somewhere, above him, all around him. Roughing him up, seeking him out with his hands.

Yuri’s hair is long now, so long that when Otabek pulls it free of its ties it tumbles down in one surging wave—down toward his face and down until the ends of it pool on the floor, tangled and brilliant and impossible, impossible to see past—

“Let me look at you,” he says, the air he finds to get the words out nothing short of a miracle. He reaches out, half-blind, his hands going up into Yuri’s hair, parting it like a curtain to reveal his face.

Yuri’s chest is heaving, his eyes glassy, but he bends to the curve of Otabek’s palm.

 _“Fuck,_ Beka.” His lips part in one rattling inhale and then he’s laughing, the sound a lightning-crackle in the lightless room. “Your thumb got my eye.”

“Those are your elbows in my ribcage.”

It’s well worth the lancing pain, the breathlessness, when Yuri looks down and smiles.

“Let me look at you,” Otabek says, again, and draws him closer.

 

* * *

 

“Are you sure?”

The question stands for many things at once—his hand on Yuri’s neck, the strands sliding and parting under his fingertips, the pair of scissor blades at rest, cold and flat against the plane of milky skin. “Here?”

“Higher,” Yuri says. Obediently the scissors lift, pause a mere two finger-widths below the earlobe.

“So, all of it?”

“I don’t need it anymore.”

(Nearly spring in Moscow, in the hallway bathroom in Yuri’s grandfather’s house, and maybe it’s no surprise, none at all, that Yuri would ask him to do something so singularly important on the night of his eighteenth birthday, no less—)

That’s all the answer there is. A handful of words, and Yuri’s eyes in the mirror, fixed and fierce and utterly impossible to deny, silencing all questions.

Otabek bows his head, measures out a length of hair between his fingers (hears other people’s voices saying silk thread, spun gold, sunbeams, entirely too much poetry in that hair for a boy who talks like the edge of a knife) and starts to cut.

 

* * *

 

There’s a big stink about it on the Internet over the next few weeks, of course, a smattering of headlines appended with some out-of-focus photo of Yuri with his hood down, sun or streetlights on his close-cropped hair, the angle of his exposed nape.

Trust people to spin out the answers to their own questions when they find none. Yuri Plisetsky is troubled. Yuri Plisetsky is ill. Yuri Plisetsky is clearly heartbroken about—something. Or someone.

Yuri Plisetsky himself shows Otabek the articles, both of them sprawled on their stomachs across the bed he’s slept in all his life. Close to midnight and they’re laughing about it, pressing their faces down into the pillows so as not to wake Yuri’s grandfather, already asleep in the room down the hall.

“Trust people,” Yuri says, shaking his head until his bangs flop down over his eyes, “to lose all their shit over something so small.”

 _They’d lose_ even more _shit,_ Otabek wants to tell him, already reaching out to brush the strands back, turn those eyes back up to the light, _if they knew what it meant._

Instead he says, “It wasn’t a small thing.” Just as it’s no small thing to be a guest in this house. His eyes are on Yuri Plisetsky, barefaced and unafraid, head tilted back in the lamplight like a challenge. “It wasn’t a small thing, and neither are you.”

It’s the only truth that matters. Perhaps, too, this is all the answer they need—Yuri catching his wrist in one hand and pulling, head dipping down to press a kiss into the center of his palm. Otabek feels the shape of those lips etch itself out on his skin like a brand, because this is Yuri Plisetsky and the last word is always his, always.

“Neither are _you_.”


End file.
